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ADDRESS 



OF 



Honorable JOHN W. GRIGGS 



AT THE 



UNVEILING OF THE STATUE 



OF 



GARRET AUGUSTUS HOBART 

LATE VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 



AT 



PATERSON, NEW JERSEY 
June J, ipoj 



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By Tranflto*. 
tlJe'06 







OR OUR dead friend whose statue is to- 
day set up we have had our period of 
mourning. The untimeliness of his 
death, the personal bereavement which 
so deeply affected his friends and fellow citizens, 
will never cease to be felt in the deepest recrions of 
our human affections. A light has gone out of our 
lives, and the gloom it left will never be dispelled. 
But the requiem has been sung : his mortal body 
slumbers in ground while the spirit has re- 
turned to God who gave it. With the world 
remain now his fame and the record of worthiness 
he made in his all-too-brief career. He has passed 
into history. The sentiments of personal admira- 
tion, of affection, and of grief which affect his 
friends and neighbors are ephemeral ;] they will 
pass away when we pass away. His character and 
service to his country will never pass away. They 
will go down from generation to generation. The 
form and the lineaments outlined in this figure of 
enduring bronze will tell posterity what manner of 
man Garret A. Hobart appeared to be. The testi- 
mony of his contemporaries, the record of his 
successful life, will show the transcendency of his 
talents, and justify the fond pride with which his 
friends have placed his statue in this public place 
and challenged the world to say whether he was 
worthy of the distinction. 

The career of Vice-President Hobart was passed 
in an exacting and a self-asserting age. That he 
found successful access to its confidence, won its 
trust, and bore away with him its universal grief, 
show that he possessed not only ability of the 



highest order, but also a charaeter and tempera- 
ment so compounded of courage and loyalty, of 
tact and sagacity, as to approach nigh to the defini- 
tion of genius. 

I think we may safely set it down that in his 
progress through life, from the bottom to the top 
of the ladder, he owed nothing to chance. His 
career was a logical process of development where 
every honor that came was but a just recognition 
of qualification and merit, and in no way a distinc- 
tion won as a reward of ambitious struggling for 
prominence. He was not one — 

" Who grasps the skirts of happy chance, 
And breasts the blows of circumstance." 

He possessed great influence over the minds 
of other men ; but it did not come from self asser- 
tion or the domination of a stronof will demandingf 
recognition of himself. It did not come from the 
cultivation of the arts of popularity. He was not 
fond of standing in the public eye. His modesty 
was great and sincere. His estimate of his own 
merit and ability was far below that which his 
friends had of him. He did not seek popularity 
by those methods which usually evoke the applause 
and admiration of the multitude. He was not 
spectacular. He never tried to thrust himself into 
prominence. The secret of his great success, both 
in private and public affairs, was in the facility 
with which he did things. He was best known and 
most appreciated by the men with whom he came 
in contact in practical work, either in business or 
politics. 



Mr. Hobart was self-reliant, but not self-assert- 
ive. He was content to do the thing in hand, and 
leave others to talk about it or claim credit for it. 
His mind was eminently practical. He never 
troubled himself about doctrines or theories, but 
combining and assimilating all that was wise and 
practical, with the illuminating brilliancy of his 
clear intellect he applied it to the subject in hand 
and reduced it to the elements of practical common 

sense. 

He never lectured or preached; he wrought. 
How helpful he was in council, how sagacious in 
advice, how clear his insight, how fertile his re- 
sources, how accurate his judgment, let those who 
have happily felt the inspiration of his genius 

testify. 

Towards public questions his attitude was re- 
poseful and conservative. Restless eagerness for 
agitation and change was foreign to his nature. 
Notoriety was not agreeable to his modest ways. 
He was no knight-errant roaming abroad in quest 
of combats. In a quiet and unostentatious spirit he 
met the work and the problems of the day as they 
arose in his pathway and swiftly solved them with 
a supreme and masterful intelligence— and with 
unerring accuracy. 

He long served as the Chairman of the Repub- 
lican State Committee of New Jersey. For many 
years he was the representative of his State upon the 
National Republican Committee. There could be no 
higher testimony to his great ability and his unsel- 
fish nature than the profound respect and the per- 
sonal affection which he acquired among his asso- 



ciates ill this service. They knew his work and his 
worth — they saw what was in him, they gauged his 
capacity and his fitness for great service. And when 
in 1896 a candidate for the Vice-Presidency was 
wanted who would embody the sound conservative 
spirit of the country and ensure, in case of the 
President's death, a Chief Magistrate whose char- 
acter and capacity, whose tactfulness and wisdom, 
would measure up to the standard of William Mc- 
Kinley, these political co-workers of Mr. Hobart, 
representing every section of the country, were the 
ones who gave shape and direction to the demand 
of his New Jersey friends and made him the unan- 
imous nominee of his party. 

The honor was by him not only wholly un- 
sought, but almost undesired. But it was the re- 
sult of the same causes which all through his life 
had led men to choose him for the leader of their 
councils — a firm and tmdoubting faith in the supe- 
riority of his talent for service. 

And now, in a wider field, and before the eyes 
of a greater multitude than he had ever faced, before 
the remainder of his work was to be accomplished. 

How well he bore the test — how with the spread 
of his name spread also his fame for great qual- 
ities of mind and administrative capacity — is known 
to all the world, and this statue is intended to pre- 
serve and perpetuate the appreciation of his grate- 
ful countrymen for his service to his Government. 

Though he had a large acquaintance with the 
leading men of his party, he was not, when he took 
the oath of office of Vice-President, widely known 
to the country. He had always been diffident about 

6 



putting himself, so to speak, in the piiblie eye. He 
was not a political orator. He helped others to be- 
come presidents of the great political conventions of 
his party while he stood modestly in the background; 
so his powers were fully known only to the fortu- 
nate ones who worked with him in the practical 
councils of the party. When he stood before the 
Senate to take the oath of office on the 4th of 
March, 1897, I suspect that a majority of the mem- 
bers of that august and unique body looked upon 
him as a novice who would in time, and with care- 
ful tutelage, attain to a proper appreciation of the 
dignity of the Senate and an understanding of its 
rules and traditions. I remember well the mild 
raising of Senatorial eyebroAvs, the looks of toler- 
ating surprise, with which the Senators listened to 
the suggestions of his inaugural address that there 
hould be some way found to end debate and reach 
a vote in that body. Their evident verdict was 
that the new Vice-President was just another like 
his predecessors— respectable, but inexperienced, 
destined to go through the mechanical labor of 
holding the gavel, but otherwise of no force or ac- 
count in the councils of the Senate. 

Yet in three months from that day there was not 
a Senator out of the whole ninety of them who was 
not ready to admit that, for facility and practical use- 
fulness, the new Vice-President was something far 
greater than they had ever had the fortune to know 
before. They found in him one who knew all the 
rules and traditions as well as the best-informed, 
and much better than the most of them— one whose 
quickness of perception and clearness in the appli- 

7 



cation of rules to parliamentary conduct excelled 
them all ; whose mind grasped, and memory re- 
tained, the status of every motion and amendment ; 
so that an appeal to him for information was as 
good as an appeal to the record of the Senate. As 
he came to be known in Washington his influence 
and reputation grew rapidly. He w^as found by the 
active leaders in Congress to be a helpful man to 
appeal to ; and in a short time he became, next to 
the President, the man whose counsel in great 
affairs as well as small ones was oftenest sought and 
most surely followed. 

There was none among the powerful and saga- 
cious members of the Administration party, either 
in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, or 
in the Cabinet, whose wisdom, intelligence and ex- 
perience were so universally called into requisition 
in the shaping of great policies and the formulation 
of important legislation. 

More unusual even than this was the relation 
that arose between the Vice-President and President 
McKinU-y. Never intimately known to each other 
prior to their election upon the same ticket, they 
came at once upon their induction into office into 
such a mutual state of confidence and personal af- 
fection as to make them a great and beautiful ex- 
ception to the ordinary formal relations maintained 
by these two officials towards each other. 

The broad public experience of McKinley and 
his training in practical statemanship, were supple- 
mented and perfected by the greater familiarity 
possessed by Mr. Hobart with the practical affairs 
of the business and political world, and by his sa- 

8 



gacious alertness, amounting; almost to intuition. 
They respected, valued, loved one another. The 
President learned very early that in Mr. Hobart he 
had an associate of extraordinary quality, one who 
could help him and who would help him ; one who 
had no selfish or jealous views, but a broad, splendid 
SDirit of friendliness, and an interest in the welfare 
and success of the Administration that was profound 
and unadulterated. 

Mr Hobart thus became the President s most 
intimate and trusted adviser. His views were 
sought upon every question of doubt or difficulty ; 
no man either in or out of the Government was so 
frequently or so fully consulted as to the conduct 
of the Administration. 

The President and the Vice-President thus be- 
came coadjutors in the fixing of the policies of the 
Administration to an extent never before known. 
They had a mutual sympathy with each other, and 
a mutual regard so earnest and loyal and true as to 
cause men to marvel at it. The advantage to the 
President from this unique association was incal- 
culable. It gave him the advantage of a potential 
representative in the legislative branch; for it 
should be borne in mind that >Ir. Hobart while 
possessing the President's confidence on the one 
hand on the other was the intimate confidant and 
adviser of his political confreres in the Senate, and 
in this way brought together in unusual harmony 
and with unprecedented sympathy the wishes and 
views of the Executive and of his party m he 
Senate. The smooth and harmonious course of the 
McKinley Administration was thus largely due to 



the rare combination which these two wise and 
tactful men formed through their mutual trust in 
one another. The tendencies of their minds were 
similar. They had no divergent theories, but both 
were equally endowed with that sound, conserva- 
tive, moderate and conciliating temperament that 
wins at once the minds and hearts of other men. 
They saw things alike because they both looked at 
the world through normal eyes, with no mental 
enlargement or astigmatism, and things thus ap- 
peared in their natural order and proportions. 
Neither was under any enchantment as to the size 
of the world or his own relation to its affairs. Both 
bore themselves with a simple, unostentatious dig- 
nity that showed them to be ideal citizens of a 
great republic. Both are gone — gone untimely as 
our human judgments measure Fate's decrees. 
Had Mr. Hobart lived and his health remained, he 
would have been the President. How well he 
would have filled that great place, how his clear 
intelligence would have penetrated the difficult 
problems that beset the chief magistracy, how just 
and sane and tactful would have been his rule, 
needs not to be told to this generation who knew^ 
his great qualities of mind and heart. But future 
generations will know from the annals of that his- 
toric Administration, and this statue will perpet- 
uate the truth, that in Garret Augustus Hobart 
our age reached its maximum in the development 
of sure intelligence, sound judgment, and sweet- 
ness of character. 

To posterity we now commit his fame. There 
are about this familiar figure of our friend none of 

lO 



the insignia of war that distinguish the monuments 
of great soldiers, none of the suggestive attitudes 
that mark the master of seience or invention, none 
of the inseriptions that denote the man of art or 
literature. It is the form of a citizen of the Re- 
public; one whose life was passed along the ordi- 
nary paths of preparation and progress, who used 
the ordinary means, in the ordinary way, but by 
supreme capacity, through pure and noble aspira- 
tion, rose to a height of fame and appreciation that 
will forever class him among the most splendid 
products of American citizenship. 



(J2268.) 

II 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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